No Way Out. David Kessler

more than the game.

      They had been going out together, on and off, for over a year now – if you could call it going out together. It had started after the Clayton Burrow case, when Martine had spent several months pursuing Alex for an interview. She was a TV reporter and she had covered what had become Alex’s most famous case. She had been one of the reporters in the observation room adjacent to the death chamber when they got the fateful call to abort the execution.

      And she had witnessed, albeit from a distance, Alex’s intense conversation with his legal intern followed by the intern’s arrest. This whole surreal episode had culminated in a high-speed car chase in the dead of night, ending in a fatal crash that unfortunately evaded the cameras of the news helicopters.

      After the case, Alex had offered some considerable resistance to Martine’s interview request, and when they did finally talk about it, she got the impression that he was holding something back. At first, she had been determined to break his resolve and get in under his guard. But somewhere along the line, she sensed that what Alex was holding back had more to do with his personal feelings than any hard facts about the case itself. She realized that Alex was all too human – nothwithstanding the predatory reputation of his profession – and thus realized also that there were limits to how predatory she could be in her own chosen vocation.

      It was only after that, and because of this softening in Martine’s character, that the relationship between them really started to develop. And even then it was a relationship at a distance, which tended to stunt its growth. She was based in Los Angeles; he in San Francisco.

      ‘I’d like to put one in your pot, babe,’ the redneck called out, as he swaggered to the bar for a refill.

      ‘Why don’t you can it?’ said Alex turning round again.

      ‘Wanna step outside and settle it like a man?’ the redneck challenged.

      ‘Why don’t you both can it!’ Martine snapped. ‘I’m trying to concentrate.’

      By this stage, the referee could no longer hope that the situation would play itself out without his intervention. He called a couple of bouncers to escort the redneck off the premises.

      Martine turned back to the table and, taking a deep breath to regain her composure, potted the black and then another red. She had come to the table with four points and eight frames on the board against her opponent’s sixty-one points and eight frames, after a nail-biting battle of safety shots. Her opponent, a petite blonde, had missed a two-cushion escape from a tricky snooker and this gave Martine a final chance to save the match on this final frame.

      But only if she made every shot.

      Keeping her cool, she made another black and then a red. But this time, the cue ball drifted towards the baulk end of the table and she had to settle for a pink instead of a black. She knew that there were no more chances. After the pink she had to pot the last red and get on the black. She sank the pink and came a little too far on the final red. Not that she couldn’t pot the red. It was an easy shot in itself. But if she just rolled it in she would be on the wrong side of the black. She had to play it with pace and come off three cushions in order to get back down the table to the black. But if she played it with pace, she also had to play it with deadly accuracy.

      She took the shot with pace…a lot of pace.

      Alex held his breath and prayed.

      The ball dropped into the pocket to shrieks of delight from the crowd. And to top it all off, the ball came to rest with perfect position to pot the black one final time.

      From there Martine cleared up: yellow, green, brown, blue pink and black. But when the frame ended, there was thunderous applause. She had made a break of fifty-eight and a frame-winning score of sixty-two.

      The crowd loved it when a match came down to the wire, however nerve-racking it might be for the players, and Martine found herself having to sign many autographs before she finally got to talk to Alex.

      ‘You were great,’ he said.

      ‘Do me a favor,’ she replied. ‘Don’t ever do that again.’

      ‘What’d I d—’

      ‘You know what I’m talking about. I don’t need you to get into fights for me. You don’t have to prove anything.’

      ‘But he was—’

      She held up her hand.

      ‘Let’s go grab a bite,’ she said, taking his hand.

       Friday, 5 June 2009 – 15.15

      ‘The reason we got a drug problem is ‘cause the man flooded the ghetto with cheap cocaine!’ the black militant shouted into the microphone. ‘And the reason things haven’t changed, brother Elias, is because we’ve still got Uncle Toms like you blaming the brothers for what the white man did to us!’

      The audience broke into loud spontaneous applause, especially the large group of the black militant’s own supporters. The white supremacist on the other side of the studio struggled above the roar of approval to make his answer heard.

      Elias Claymore was enjoying himself. It was fiery guests like these who made Claymore’s ratings. The militants might get the anger off their chest, but it was Claymore who’d make more money thanks to the syndication deal.

      Claymore was just as black as this militant guest of his. Now in his late fifties, tall and broad-shouldered, his colorful life had run the gamut from left-wing radical to Islamic fundamentalist to neo-conservative and born-again Christian.

      This was meant to be a three-way debate between secular black militants, Black Muslims and the Ku Klux Klan. But the black militant had turned the debate on conservative blacks, including Claymore himself, and made the white supremacists in the studio – who had raised the drug issue in the first place – largely irrelevant.

      ‘What they did to us is no excuse for what we’re doing to ourselves, brothers!’ Claymore replied. ‘We have to stop blaming others. We used to be slaves to the white man. Now we’re slaves to the white powder. I say it’s time for us to break the chains and set ourselves free once and for all!’

      Again the audience burst into thunderous applause, except the small cadre of militants. Claymore looked around and saw the approval on the faces of most of the audience, black and white. The black militant had almost won them over, but Claymore knew that with a few well-chosen words he had won them back.

      Then a man wearing a suit and a bow tie with a crescent on it spoke up. ‘If you think that joining the white establishment is a solution,’ said the besuited man, ‘then you’re as big a fool as he is.’

      ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Claymore.

      ‘I mean you’ve jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. You’ve betrayed your people twice over.’

      He was a tall, slim, dapper figure and he was known to be Claymore’s arch enemy. The man was a leading member of the Nation of Islam. Claymore had once belonged to his sect, but had later become disillusioned with it.

      ‘Would you care to elaborate?’ Claymore challenged.

      ‘I’m talking about Islam, the religion of the black man, the religion you turned your back on when you became an apostate.’

      ‘An apostate to Islam or an apostate to the Nation of Islam? The two are not the same. Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam but never turned his back on Islam. Yet that didn’t save him from getting murdered.’

      This was one of his favorite challenges to his former sect. Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam in disillusion both at its policy of separatism and at the practices of its leader.

      But the well-dressed man in the audience was